Digitalkatie's blog

NC DMC: Comparison chart of units at different levels

I've spent a great deal of the morning trying to get my head around the core and optional units for the National Certificate in Digital Media Computing at the different levels.

For each of the levels 4,5 and 6 (Int 1, Int 2 and Higher) there is a long list of optional units at different levels.  There is a lot of crossover, but I wasn't sure how much overlap there was.  I have an SQA spreadsheet with them as a long list, but I wanted to show for each unit which levels it could count towards.

This is now available here.  

Interestingly it looks like this might be the first time this has been done as there are some anomalies, particularly with the core units.  Some of the core units are valid as optional units at other levels.  

For example, you could teach the six Int 1 core units, then progress on to the Int 2 core units with your class.  The topics are the same, however that would be the pupils completed their NC in DMC without actually having selected any optional units.

Also, why is the level 5 unit in Computing: Problem Solving and Planning not a valid unit for the Higher NC but all the other non-core level 5 units are on the list?  Strange.

It is a really huge set of lists so I can understand why these problems have slipped through.  I would hope that no-one would want to teach the Int 2 NC without covering any optional units.  If nothing else, there are some really interesting and fun units on the list!

NC in Media: a first look

I was at a very interesting session at the AMES conference today on the new National Certificate in Media.

I had been interested in this from the Digital Media Computing perspective. I had been hoping that there would be more crossover with the two NCs but I have been disappointed. It is still an interesting course though.

As with all NCs, students need to do 12 units, six of which are core (compulsory) units.

My hope was that the optional units would include units also on the NC DMC list. My initial idea was that at my school students could do the NC DMC in S3-S5 then in S6 they could pick up the extra units that would be needed for the Media NC. Looking at the Media NC I now realise this would not be possible.

What is interesting is the amount of crossover, where with a bit of planning students could pick up two or more units for a project.

For example, imagine you're teaching video production by doing a project where students film and edit a short film. As long as copyright and file formats are studied and discussed then students could gain the Media: Basic Video Editing unit and the Computing: Video Editing unit. The performance criteria for both units are very similar. Chances are you could also award units in Working With Others and Problem Solving as well.

I think it will require more analysis (and I'm working from memory on the Computing units as I'm on the train home) but I think there is potential for picking up a lot of units in this fashion. They may not lead to a qualification or award in school but it may be that pupils can they go on to complete NCs at FE college.

Another interesting thought is that there is a huge potential for departments collaborating and working together to cover NC units in a shorter period of time. For example students in S5 could do the NC Media across three or four columns involving English, Art, Computing and Business Studies. Saying this, I think it would be more practical and sensible to send the pupils interested in this off to college where they have the skills, resources and equipment to teach TV or Radio to a higher standard.

So why would schools be interested in the NC in Media? It is a flexible course where the core units do not specify a particular industry so it can be adapted to fit skills and interests of the school. The sectors studied can be TV, radio, film, animation, computer games, interactive media, press, advertising, music and literature. The ownership, organisation, jobs roles and regulation within these industries are studied. The creative process is also studied and students then research and develop creative concepts for different platforms.

The course is highly practical. One of the core units is a Media Project (a double unit) and another is Working With Others. Do a big web design or computer game project and that's half of the core units completed already.

The crossovers with the NC in DMC seem to be in video production, radio production / sound recording and basic website development.

The major downside to the NC in Media is there are currently no National Progress Awards. I see this as being crutial to running NCs in schools. The SQA are at the stage of seeing if there is a demand for NPAs in Media. If you are at all interested in teaching this in the future I suggest you contact the SQA and express your NPA desires!

From personal experience I have found the SQA are open to suggestions for NPAs. Julie McLaren at Forrester suggested an NPA in Computer Games Development and now a few of us are planning the awards. We're at an early stage but it is very interesting. 

Don't just moan that the SQA aren't listening - get involved and make suggestions! What do YOU want to teach?!

Memory...

I haven't been blogging for a while. It's mainly because I don't like blogging about negative things.

Today is a negative thing, but maybe someone out there can help.

My annual department for all software, peripherals, textbooks, photocopying, printing costs etc is around £300 - £360. This year had decided I was going to try and spend as much as I could on extra memory for my class computers.

I have 21 computers. 19 of them have only 512Mb of memory. They struggle to run a web browser. There is no way I can run video editing on them for the Digital Media Computing course from June.

The other two computers have 1Gb of RAM. These are replacement machines for a couple that have broken in the last couple of years.

My plan was to buy 1Gb RAM for half of the machines, take out the 512 Mb memory from them and put them into the other half of the machines. This would only cost about £300 to upgrade to 1Gb in the whole class.

I've been told under the existing contract that we are not allowed to open the boxes. I can kinda accept that. It's good business sense to not have your users fiddle with the insides of the machinery.

What is dissappointing is that the cost to 'officially' upgrade would be around £150 per machine and I'd have to upgrade all of them (no juggling memory about). That works out at £2850.

Now I realise that engineer time is involved, but that would surely only be one hour travelling and one hour to slot in the memory (it's not a difficult job, I'm sure all of my 1P1 class would be able to do it if I showed them once)

I also realise that if a computer fails and it is replaced with another machine that uses a different type of memory then they would need to make buy memory of the new type. However this isn't a factor as the replacement machines are coming in with 1Gb as standard.

So it looks like my choices are:

1) Try to sneak an £300 order for memory past the ICT Co-ordinator / Business Manager

2) Upgrade just two computers and see if the kids figure out which ones are faster

3) Get 1P1 to 'accidentally' damage the computers gradually so they get replaced with 1Gb machines. 1P1 would not need training or demonstrations for this!

4) Give up and carry on moaning with other teachers about the state of the computers, the speed of the network or the fact that the sole teacher of Computing doesn't have permission to install software or upgrade patches.

Any ideas? Anyone out there with a spare 10 sticks of DDR 400MHz SDRAM they want to donate to education?!

Digital Media Computing: Verification

For your information, the NC Digital Media Computing is auto-verified by the SQA, as are all the units and NPAs. This means any centre currently providing SQA units can offer these without having to fill in lots of forms and be verified.

We have also been assured that the course (the NPAs) count for statistics and STACS, so it shouldn't affect how your school is doing in the statistics. I don't know very much about this though so plase don't ask me ;-)

Digital Media Computing: a shopping list (part 1)

I handed in my wish list today. We are able to bid for the last of the 20:20 funding so I wanted to bid for software and hardware I think we'll need for the new course.

The main cost is software. I've given five different options. My best option is getting Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium. This includes Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Fireworks. I think this is worth the huge cost (even with an educational discount) because the pupils will be learning industry standard packages. Having them listed on your CV gives you a much better chance of a job than if you have other software packages writen down.

Alternatives to Web Premium are
a) Get Web Design (without Photoshop) and buy Photoshop Elements (is it hugely different??)

b) Get Web Design (without Photoshop) and use Fireworks instead.

c) Buy Flash and Photoshop Elements, then use the free educational licences for Microsoft Expression Studio for web design.

d) Buy Flash, then use the free educational licences for Microsoft Expression Studio for web design and graphics

The cost difference between a school site licence for Adobe Web Elements and my alternative d) is about five grand! I can't believe how expensive Adobe Education prices. Microsoft and AutoDesk have the right idea, giving software away to students and schools. Unfortunately I still think Adobe has the edge over Microsoft in terms of employability.

I have consulted a couple of web/media people I know on Twitter, but I would welcome anyone's opinions on this. What do you feel?

Bye Standard Grade, hello Digital Media Computing

I finally managed to get together my funding bid for almost everything I thing I'll need to start teaching the new NC Digital Media. I'm hoping to blog about the process of changing so that other schools can learn what we're doing (and do it better!).

I'll blog about my shopping list later, but today I'll explain what we're changing to and why.

I hate Standard Grade Computing. It is pretty much the course I did when I was a kid. I imagine in the late 80's and early 90's it was an incredible course and kids loved finding out about robotics and virtual reality and expert systems. I certainly loved it. However as a teacher I find it very difficult to explain the relevance of this stuff to kids lives.

I started researching alternative courses in 2006/7. I found out about the English course, called DIDA, which looked promising, and industry certification, but I was told I had to offer SQA courses for the school stats.

The SQA have now developed a National Certificate in Digital Media Computing at three levels: Intermediate 1, Intermediate 2 and Higher. An NC is equivalent to first year in college and would hopefuly mean pupils could then get accepted into a wide range of HNC and HND courses (direct entry into second year).

The NC consists of a set of six core units and six optional units from a choice of almost 60 units. The units to choose from include animation, games design, web design, graphics, audio and video editing, etc.

Sets of three units group to give you additional awards, called National Progress Awards. There are NPAs in Web Design and Digital Literacy etc. There are lots more sitting temptingly on a list with a release date of Dec08 and Jan09 but I don't know what's happening to them. These are in Games Design, animation, still image, sound and video, etc. I REALLY want to do these, so if anyone in the SQA knows about these please let me know! The SQA call centre weren't particulary useful and everyone else has their answering machines permanently turned on!

It looks like teaching different levels of units at the same time will work, and only half of the units need to be at the level of the NC (eg you only need 6 units at Int2 level to get an Int 2 NC) which helps students progress and advance.

I'm going to have to think carefully about which units to teach when. Some units will work well across the whole time. for example there is a blogging unit, so pupils could blog throughout their course (and be reading blogs too).

My plan is to do three units in S3 and three units in S4. Three of the units over the two years will combine for an National Progression Award. If they choose to stay on in fifth year, and I hope this will be a good incentive to stay on, they can complete the other six units. Of those, two can be completed in other departments, the literacy and numeracy units. That leaves four to complete in S5 Computing time. Actually I'm hoping to do more than three a year in S3/4, but we'll see how it goes. We won't have to deal with prelims and revision which should help. It's going to be very different not having to cram content and facts into kids as quick as I can. I need to remember to take it easy and have time to explore and have fun learning!

Maternity Leave? (Part 2)

Carrying on from the previous post, I forgot to say Louis was at his first business meeting on Friday. I had done work with Scottish Screen in the past, training Primary and Secondary teachers how to use moving image in class. Some of the advice and materials for creating video was later put onto a website, but now they want to complete the other sections of the website.

I will be helping out with a couple of the other Lead Practitioners in writing pages for the Analyse and Explore sections. Analyse will look at activities you can do with pupils to study the sound, colour, camera angles etc of film clips. Explore will help pupils understand more about our moving image cultural heritage and hopefully help them enjoy films beyond the mainstream Hollywood.

Thankfully I am able to work up to 10 days on maternity leave. Saying that I don't know when my maternity leave started, if it even has started - my last payslip was still showing me as off ill rather than on maternity leave. Ho hum.

Who-ever made that decision needs to see a Doctor

Sad news this week.  Series 4 of Doctor Who is currently being filmed for broadcast in 2008.  Unfortunately the BBC have decided that series 5 won't be broadcast till 2010.  To cope with the lack of the Doctor in 2009 they will film three specials for that year.  :-(

TV Festival: Vint Cerf

Nov 22nd 1977 - first time Arpanet, radio and satellite networks all communicated together.

1997 50 million users, today 1114 million users. =argest is Asia with 398.7 mill. Africa has 33.3 million and greatest potential for expansion.

Vint Cerf was the person who decided in 1976 that 32 bits was fine for address space for the purpose of the experiment they din't know would work. These will run out in 2011. IPv6 should solve this.

Socio-economic effects of internet:
Consumers are now producers. The barrier to contributing has dropped to 0.
Social Networking - people organising the web around themselves and their friends
Gameplaying in Second Life and WoW etc
New business models such as eBay and Amazon that are not possible without internet.
Internet can transport and display print, video, audio media
Internet permits group interaction (not only mass one-way medium)

Cerf bought 10 million bits of storage in 1979, and was very excited about it. Cerf bought a terrabyte recently for 1000 dollars. He calculated a terrabyte would have cost 100 million dollars.

Arpanet backbone ran at 50 KB per second, now internet backbone is gigabits per second.

Discusses possibility of downloading ancillary information with video, captions, audio, etc. You could pause video then click object or parts of the video to get more information. You could have adverts based on user location - pause a cooking show, click on the bottle of wine and get information on where to buy it nearby.

Mobiles are not just telephones anymore. Text can be used to control entertainment systems or for payment systems (especially in places whre people don't have bank accounts but have mobiles). Tiny screens (suitable if you're three inches tall :-) but are now often have navigation systems inside. Queries are now in real-time. We can do google queries when we need to and don't have to plan beforehand.

We can't print copies as backup anymore as information is often 3d interactive objects. Now we need to worry about "Bit Rot". Preserving interpretive programs (trying to use Powerpoint 1997 on Windows 3000) and the operating system, and hardware that runs the OS, for thousands of years. In a thousand years information that might have been useful we might not have access to.

Billions of devices on the internet soon. One guy has created an internet enabled surfboard so he doesn't get bored waiting for the next wave.

InterPlaNetary Internet (Cerf working with NASA). We have rovers landing on Mars sending information back. They want to standardise the devices in deep space so that devices can pass information between each other. Rovers on Mars passed info to Mars satellites then onto Earth. "The distance between the planets is literally astronomical"

TCP IP doesn't work with a 45 minute delay and when the planets turn around inconveniently. A new protocol being developed.

Innovation happens when people can experiment without needing permission to try things. Google engineers get 20 percent innovation time. Opportunity to try things out without having anyone interfere. They share details so everyone is free to contribute. (note - do we allow kids to innovate in this way?!)

Bob Metcalf predicted in 1997 that the internet would have a 'gigalapse' and collapse. When it didn't happen he took the editorial he wrote, put them in a blender and ate them!

When asked about video being restricted to particular countries, Cerf believes internet should be a global communications medium. There needs to be inter-government cooperation to deal with problems of fraud etc.

TV Festival: Quite Interesting Technology

Panel discussion on social networking.

Joanna Shields, President of Bebo has been discussing Bebo's soap opera Kate Modern.

Patrick Walker from Google / YouTube discussed the integration of the two companies. They will be having in-video adverts, not pre or post roll but a flash overlay at the bottom of the screen for 10 seconds, like you get on TV saying 'coming next'.

On the Panorama show last week about violent content online, Patrick says that they rely on users flagging videos as inappropriate. There is also a problem of different culture feelings about what is inappropriate.

Jonathan Smith, from TT Games, demonstrated the Lego Star Wars game.

Anthony Lilley from Magic Lantern Production says that traditional media can't be in denial about interactivity and new media, there is no option any more. He suggests not trying to restrict users into options because they will find new ways. On the "press the red button now" ethos, he feels it's TV starting to grasp interactivity. We're moving beyond just putting clips of shows to increase traffic to official websites. Its reductionalist to assume that because people are telling stories using technology that it will hurt Steven Spielberg's budget or income.

It's interesting to compare the audiences from today and yesterday. Today I am the only person with any technology visable whereas yesterday every second person had a laptop out using the free wifi.

James Shields demonstrated using a computer game without keys or mouse, just using just a device on his head and calm thoughts!